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    Importing from OCLC in Unicode

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    • Article Type: General
    • Product: Aleph
    • Product Version: 18.01

    Description:
    I can't see anything in the "How to Load OCLC Records" documentation on what (if anything) is necessary to load Unicode records from OCLC. Our experiments seem to say that Aleph will detect the character set of the record automatically, so we don't need to make any Aleph configuration changes. Can you verify that I'm not missing anything, please?

    Resolution:
    The ALEPH software will recognize the leader byte in the MARC record that indicates UTF-8 encoding (unicode). This means that the incoming record will be loaded 'as is', without undergoing any character conversion. So you don't have to do anything.

    One thing to note. OCLC uses de-composed characters for handing many diacritics, rather the precomposed that ALEPH catalogers are used to seeing. This is fine. Both encodings appear correctly in the OPAC and other public interfaces. It's just that sites are sometimes confused to see the OCLC encoding of these characters.

    • Article last edited: 10/8/2013